A Promise Kept - 1968 Saab Sonett

A novice restorer produces a trophy-winning 1968 Saab Sonett V4

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Saabs have always had a way of lighting up Ralph Bockoven's imagination. It happened with the two-stroke 95, the bull-nose station wagon that his sister and her MIT grad-student husband brought home when Ralph was 8; it happened again with the two-stroke 96 sedan his brother brought home from college one Christmas Eve. And it happened with the derelict 1968 Sonett V4 that Ralph, then a six-year employee of Charles River Saab in suburban Boston, was invited to see at a customer's house one day in 1989.
From the owner's description, Ralph had expected to see a car a good ways along in its restoration. Instead, the Sonett was sitting on the edge of the woods behind the house, the branch of a huge elm tree poised over its back window. "To most people, it would have looked like a hunk of junk," he recalls. "But I was just absolutely, thoroughly taken by the car--smitten immediately. It looked so darn cool. It was chock full of parts and the front floors were rotted out. But in that one quick snapshot, that dreamy moment, I imagined this car all fixed up and restored."
He said as much to Robert Nindell, the owner, who suggested that Ralph buy the car. "He said, 'I've got to be realistic; my health isn't so good. The car shouldn't be outside much longer--it was taking up my wife's parking space--and you're a young guy, you have the energy and the passion to do it.'" The owner wanted $2,000 for the car and all the parts; Ralph, who was still making payments on his new 1986 Saab 900 Turbo, countered with an offer of $1,000. They parted without a deal.
Three days later, Robert called Ralph. "He said, 'I'm going to lay all my cards on the table with you. I'm not going to be living a whole lot longer. I've got pancreatic cancer. But I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to accept your offer. All you've got to do is promise me that you will restore it.' And I said, 'I'm going to restore it, I promise you that. I don't know how long it's going to take me, I don't know much about it, but I'm going to dive in and see what happens.'" When Ralph arrived to collect the car a few weeks later, he learned that Robert had passed away the day before.
The car Ralph brought home to his two-car garage was one of 1,610 Sonett V4s built by Saab between 1967 and 1969. Introduced in 1966 as the Sonett II, the little fiberglass two-seater was renamed when the two-stroke triple it shared with the sedans and station wagons was replaced with the German Ford-supplied Taunus 1,500cc V-4 engine. The four-stroke Sonett gained an off-kilter hood bulge to clear the V-4's carburetor, but kept the earlier car's column-shifted transmission. In late 1969, the Sonett V4 was replaced by the Sonett III, still powered by the V-4 and wearing redesigned bodywork that now included flip-up headlamps.
From the beginning, Ralph had a vision for the Sonett. As a Saab mechanic, he was familiar with the company's Sport and Rally catalog of the late 1960s, which was filled with engine and suspension pieces developed through Saab's extensive rallying experience; what he wanted was a car that would offer a good balance between performance and driveability. "I didn't reinvent the wheel, I just followed Saab's instructions. I copied, that's all I did," he says.
Because this was his first restoration, and because he wanted to shorten the project's time frame as much as possible, Ralph turned to professionals for part of the work. He brought the car to an independent Saab garage outside of Boston to have the floors repaired and the engine rebuilt. He was able to order a new brake master cylinder, brake pressure switch, Sonett V4 hood emblem and chrome headlamp bezels right from the Saab catalog. Amazingly, he was even able to order a new floor for the 1963 Saab 96 he plans to restore. Seldom has finding parts been so convenient.
With the floors repaired, Ralph separated the fiberglass body from the steel "tub," and brought the body over to another shop for repairs and refinishing. "The tub is very robust," he says. "It's basically a 96 chassis; that is a very robust piece of unit-body construction done by aircraft engineers, and I'm told it's extremely strong. The fiberglass shell just gets mounted on it, and not with a whole lot of fasteners. You and I could probably have that body off in an hour and a half."
Ralph shipped the four-speed transmission to specialist John Vanlandingham, a highly experienced 96 V-4 rally car driver from Seattle, Washington. "He's done literally thousands of V-4 rebuilds. He had all the bearings, and the jig to do it," he says. "I can rebuild standard 900 transmissions all day long, but the V-4 96 transmission, that's something you want done by somebody with experience to make sure it stays glued together. They are an art form. And I was going to be running a high-performance engine through it, so I had no problem subletting that."
Not having any experience with upholstery, Ralph turned to a local craftsman, who wowed him with his portfolio of five-figure jobs he had done on new Mercedes-Benzes in New York. Ralph had only a brochure to show him how the interior should look. "This guy was a total craftsman," he recalls. "He had a little place down in his basement, and you could see he knew what he was doing. He says, 'Three thousand dollars, I'll do it in high-quality leather.' I told him I didn't want leather, because I wanted to be period correct. He said, 'Twenty-five hundred, I'll do it in high-quality vinyl. Be done in one week.' He called me a week later and said, 'Come over, it's all done.' It was done to perfection. People who know Saabs have looked at it and said, 'Wow, this really looks perfect.' It was worth every penny."
He was much less satisfied with how his Sonett drove. To gain additional power, he had replaced the 1,498cc engine with a 1,698cc V-4 from a junked 1972 Saab 96--"at one time, I had a sea of old Saabs in my parents' backyard"--and had it rebuilt to Rally and Sport Phase 2 specifications. The block was bored from the stock 90mm to 90.8mm, yielding a displacement of 1,730cc. Stuffed into the bores were flat-top Carl Schmidt pistons, which raised the compression from the stock 9.1:1 to 10.4:1, without having to take any material off the cylinder heads. ARP forged chrome moly rod bolts were used to keep the stock connecting rods together.
Larger valves--42mm for the intakes, and 36mm for the exhausts, versus 37mm and 32mm for the stock items--were installed in the heads. Still following Rally and Sport specification, Ralph replaced the standard, single-barrel Solex 32 PDFIT carburetor with a 40mm Weber DFAV-1 carburetor with dual synchronized barrels. A Y-header, made by Saab V-4 performance guru Jack Lawrence of Motor Sport Services in Jamestown, New York, fed into a 2-inch straight exhaust pipe, with a Turbo muffler at the rear.
Ralph wanted to dress up the engine with a pair of period, aftermarket aluminum rocker covers, but was unable to track down any for sale. An acquaintance had an idea: Why not see if a local maker of aluminum flagpoles could cast another set? Using a borrowed pair of originals to make molds, the flagpole maker turned out perfect reproductions, at a total cost of $500.
When the engine was put together, Ralph found that he and the builder had been following different philosophies. "I wanted a nice, fun street car that would be quick enough," he says. "I didn't want to have to drive around town at 7 grand." Yes, the V-4 was powerful, but it made all of its power much too high in the rev band. And the exhaust system was just unacceptably loud.
"I took the whole car apart again. I took the engine out because I had to reseal the oil pan and replace the rear main seal," he said. He bought as many Weber carburetor books as he could find, and studied its workings. After experimenting with different jet sizes--and replacing the camshaft with a milder 7.6 fast road cam--he found success. "I finally got it to run like a normal car, and it still has more than enough performance," he says. He added a long glasspack muffler after the header, and installed a Magnaflow stainless steel muffler, sectioned by an inch so that it would fit. (Ralph made sure that the tailpipe would exit through the original hole in the rear valance.) Dynamometer results show that the engine makes 110hp at the flywheel--a 50 percent improvement over the stock 73hp at the crankshaft. At the New Hampshire Speedway, Ralph has pegged the 120 MPH speedometer. "I wanted a well-behaved engine that was good across the entire powerband, and I think I achieved that," he said.
One thing Ralph did not do, as some Sonett II owners have done, was move the shift lever from the steering column to the floor. "I would never do that in a million years. That, to me, is complete blasphemy," he said. "It flies convention right in the face, which is what that car is supposed to do. They made so few of these cars--why would you want to change one of the endearing idiosyncrasies of the car?"
Five years after he had begun, the car was finished. Ralph drives it as often as he can, which amounts to about 3,000 miles a year. He's driven it to five national Saab Owners Conventions: Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995; Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2002, Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 2003; Troy, Michigan, in 2007 and Aurora, Ohio, in 2010. It has also worked its way into family lore: Ralph's wife, Karen, went into labor with their first child, Connor, two hours after a spirited ride in the Sonett.
The car has brought home its share of trophies--"I think it's got a horseshoe stuck somewhere inside of it, or something," Ralph quips--and at least one memorable photograph. At the most recent SOC in Ohio, Ralph met Saab's new owner, Victor Muller, and CEO, Jan-Åke Jonsson, and had a photograph taken with them in front of the Sonett. He still can't get over it. "Back in '89, it's sitting in the woods, just rotting away--then it's standing next to the guy who owns Saab, and the company's CEO." Quite a transformation, indeed.

This article originally appeared in the April, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.